Saturday, March 26, 2005

Irish flags lining the streets, a huge party at Hayarkon Park and hundreds of kegs of extra beer in the pubs are ready for what municipality spokesman Kobby Barda described as the largest number of foreign football fans ever to travel to Israel for a match.

"We've never had anything like it in the history of Israeli football and we saw this as an opportunity to target a new market," said Barda, who is also spokesman of the Tel Aviv Tourism Association.

Extra beer in the pubs yesterday? Surely all those Irish fans will have shunned the pubs seeing as it was Good Friday. Okay, apparently not.